Whenever people defend or attack a Marvel or DC film, others always accuse them of being a Marvel or DC fanboy. At the moment Marvel films are doing better with critics, so if people complain about a DC film getting a bad wrap in comparison, they are automatically said to be DC fanboys.

Some of the complaints are that the critics will automatically like a Marvel film because it’s a Marvel film and dislike a DC film because it’s a DC film, but I think there’s more to it than that. It wasn’t so long ago that it was DC films such as the Nolan Dark Knight Trilogy, or Burton’s two before that, or even the two Superman films before that, that the critics were loving. Is it just recently that all of the critics have become Marvel fanboys?

In a way, yes, when it comes to the newer films, and for a good reason. Now that films are favoring the serial form, the key is to build characters that the viewers can get behind and want to come back to see more of. The fact is that for these recent run of films the MCU just does this better than the DCU, and because of that, critics are going to enjoy the thing that is done better. There’s no Rotton Tomato conspiracy.

The DCU had too obvious disadvantages that undermined it. One was that their previous Batman series was very hard to top, giving it a shaky foundation to begin with so soon after it was finished, and second that it had to play catch up with the MCU which was four or five films in when the DCU had it’s first underwhelming debut. Inevitably these first impressions echoed in their sequels, no matter how much better or worse they were.